Slashcast Insider Interview with furiosity

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Slashcast Insider Interview with furiosity
Interviewer:	emmagrant01
Interviewee:	furiosity
Date(s):	September 9, 2006
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Harry Potter
External Links:	online here as a transcript, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Slashcast Insider Interview with furiosity is a podcast created by and posted to Slashcast as "Episode 9." Slashcast includes an transcript.

The interviewer is emmagrant01, the interviewee is furiosity.

There is much discussion regarding the specific fics: Sin for Me, Unintended, Alpha Watch, and Mind Stalking.

The Interview Series

See Slashcast Insider Interview Series.

Excerpts

[When I first started writing fanfiction]: Um, it was in the Matrix fandom, actually. Shortly after I started in the fandom, I had the idea for what is, I don't know if you're familiar with the movie, but, um, there's a part where the main character takes a red pill and I decided to write an AU fanfic of, "What if he took the blue pill?" And it just sort of went down hill from there.

I was aware of the [ Harry Potter ]fandom through fandomwank even before I was in the fandom because I was- I used to watch fandomwank and just read the stuff that used to come up and I used to think, "Wow, those Harry Potter fans are really crazy." And then I watched the third film and I thought, "Wow, I really want to know what happens next." Neither the first nor the second film did that, and I didn't feel like reading the books or anything like that because I thought, "Yea, whatever, it's kid's stuff." And then- and then the third movie came out and it was so much darker and the storyline just got so much more interesting that I went out and got all the books and within, you know, a week I had them all read and I was pretty much hooked. It was- Um, I lurked in the fandom for about four months, though, before I started doing anything.

...in the Matrix fandom, I had no idea that people were writing ship fic. I was in the meta corner of the fandom. Like, we mostly talked about theories and stuff and I knew that fanfiction was out there and that people wrote fanfic, obviously, because I wrote it myself, but it was all gen. Until I was already in the Harry Potter fandom, I did not know that people wrote actually ship fic of any sort, pornographic or otherwise. I'm an editor at the Open Directory project; it's a web directory, basically, where we review websites and we give them descriptions and we publish them in a topical category listing, and I was the editor for 'kids and teens: Harry Potter' and I started reading this fansite that got submitted and one of the things that was on it, one of the pages was fanfiction and it linked to Love Under Will. And I went to- I went to read it, just to see what sort of fanfiction it was, and that was pretty much- I was like, "Wow, this is definitely not suitable for children," and, "Wow, this is really strange. I've never encountered this before."

[regarding futurefic]: Well, it's mostly that you can go anywhere with the plots. You can use any characterization for either of the boys - not any characterization, but basically I mean, there's so many ways you can go with Draco after Half Blood Prince, so many ways you can go even with Harry. What happens after Half Blood Prince is the horcrux hunt. That's all Harry's gonna do, that's all he's gonna care about and there's only so many ways you can tell the same story before you get really bored. I've written quite a few fics set after book 6- well, quite a few compared to, you know, the number of Ron/Hermione fics that I've written. But yea, I get really bored because, I mean, I've already come up with all sorts of ideas and I think a lot of people, they don't want to read somebody else's version of the horcrux hunt just 'cause, you know, it's going to be in book 7 anyway, so I think post-book 7 stuff, it just gives a lot more freedom with regards to what we can write and what we can come up with.

[regarding my story Sin for Me ]: It was a prompt, actually. It was karaz's prompt, where she wanted to see a Harry who decides to take- well, not take over the world. He decides to change things in the wizarding world to better suit what he thinks should be happening. It really started with one scene. I saw Ron and Harry playing chess and talking about world domination and obviously there was a toned down version of that scene in the fic where it's not Ron, but Ron's portrait and they're not talking about world domination, but that was basically the idea that popped into my head at the time that I saw the prompt and claimed it. I just sort of went from there. That's how it usually happens - I usually get the most cracktastic scene in my head. I think I must have been writing it for four days straight with very few breaks. It was coming out really quickly, and there were all these ideas coming out and I just, that's why I said that I'm going to write more in that universe, because there are just so many things that I didn't put in because there was no room.

The feedback I get from readers and from beta readers has been invaluable. I mean, I have improved so much since I first started writing, since I first started actually showing what I've written to other people. If you're willing to listen to people give you criticism, even if it's not constructive, 'cause sometimes you can even learn from not so constructive criticism. I've made myself willing to listen and I sort of told myself that, you know, they're not telling you that your baby's ugly. This is stuff that, you know, that you've created, you've put it out there and, you know, people have the right to say what they think. And, you know, sometimes they will even say things that make sense and that can actually help you, so, you know, that's a good thing.